GIMP Stroke Styles

The way I've been doing illustrations in GIMP up to this point has included importing paths from Inkscape and applying a stroke to that path. That stroke is usually a solid black line of some appropriate width. But what if I'd like to add a bit more life to my inkwork? In this post I'll try to experiment a bit with the Stroke Styles and different Tool Settings.

So, I start by creating a pretty random path with some nice quirks. I also split it in the sharp corners to make the strokes as authentic as possible. I figure that if you'd draw it by hand you would probably stop in these places and restart on the next section.

My random path to stroke.

I duplicate this path a bunch of times, aligns them and distributes them nicely over the workspace. Then it's time to go nuts.To stroke the path in GIMP, simply right click the path in the Paths dialog and seelct Stroke Path... to open the Stroke Path dialog. This is also available from the main menu.

The Stroke Path dialog.

Basic Lines

I start of with the basic line, first a solid 15 pixels wide one and then, by expanding the Line Style part and selecting the "Dense Dots" dash preset, I create a dotted line. 

Basic lines.

Using paint tools

After that I select the Pencil Tool and set up the Tool Settings for this by selecting the circular "Hardness 100" brush and setting it to a wide 25 pixels size. I'll use pretty wide strokes here just to make all differences visible. Then in the Stroke Path dialog, instead of Stroke Line, I check Stroke with a paint tool and then select the Pencil in the drop down and click Stroke. Then I do the same for both Paintbrush and Ink. I can not say I understand the Ink Tool, all I know is that I had to lower the size to 16 pixels and it still was very wide. Strange... A topic for another blog post maybe....

Stroke using different paint tools.

Dynamics

I've noticed the little Emulate brush dynamics check box in the Stroke Path dialog so I checked this and tried again, and, lo and behold, the Ink stroke was suddenly thinner and with nice endings. Beautiful! When I'm on it I'll try out the Paintbrush with some different Dynamics as well.

Strokes with emulated brush dynamics. Click to enlarge image.

I think I'm happy for now, this will not only be good to use when applying strokes to a path but will also be a good reference to different dynamics when using my tablet to draw, I know there are more settings to fiddle around with in this area but - for now - I'm satisfied.

10-4 //Niklas